Things In Politico That Make Me Want To Guzzle Antifreeze, Part The Infinity

There are days when it becomes completely clear that the kidz at Tiger Beat On The Potomac should be kept away from actual issues for the same reason that we don't give toddlers RPGs. This is one of those days.

The story of what has become of the Affordable Care Act is the story of the catapulting of successful propaganda. It is the triumph of hogwash set aloft by many hands. There is simply no other story about it worth telling, and it is not about messaging, no matter what my man Chuck Todd may believe. It is about the same weaponized bullshit that brought us the murder of Vince Foster, and the Mena airport, and the president's birth certificate, and Benghazi, Benghazi!, BENGHAZI! It is the great victory for the kind of alternate-reality-detached-from-reason politics practiced by modern conservatism. To borrow a trope from Chris Hayes, it is about the complete failure of our elites -- most especially, the elite courtier press of the Beltway. It is the story of vandalism. It is the story of nihilism. It is the story of how our political process -- and our other major political party -- is ill-equipped to deal with either one. This, however, is how the kidz explain it:

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Every branch of the federal government played a role in weakening the law over the past three years, the casualty of a divisive legislative fight, a surprise Supreme Court ruling, a complex implementation and an unrelenting political opposition. The result has been a stark gap between the promise of Obamacare and the reality - one that has fueled a deep vein of skepticism about the law as it enters its most critical phase.

Only the last item on that list is undeniably true. This would be worthy of exploration at length. (Why are the Republicans hell-bent on destroying a health-care reform birthed at the Heritage Foundation and first put into practice by the party's 2012 presidential nominee? Why did said nominee have to run away from his single, and singular, political achievement? Both good questions. Neither question is asked.) Everybody's to blame. Nobody's to blame. Let's all go to lunch.

And then, as our first witness for the prosecution, we meet an Ordinary Citizen who has been so bamboozled, poor dear, that at this point she'll believe almost anything.

"Oh, I've heard of Obamacare, yes, but I didn't know all that was involved," said Cindy Bishop, a part-time worker from Lexington, Ky., who stopped by an Obamacare information booth at the state fair last month. "Everybody that I have ever talked to is totally against it. They're afraid all the doctors are going to pull out, and you're going to have to be like Canada and have to be on a waiting list."

OK, it doesn't matter to the authors of this piece that nothing the woman has come to believe about the Affordable Care Act is true. (There is no evidence that doctors are going to "pull out." The Canadian waiting-lists are real, but Obamacare is not a Canadian system by the longest shot and, anyway, the Canadians still favor their system over ours.) It doesn't matter that this woman plainly has been lied to. It doesn't matter to them that it might be worth examining who's been doing the lying and, most important, why. Why people lie to the country used to be important. And while the piece does get around to mentioning that Republican recalcitrance has played a role in the difficulties in the plan's roll-out, an admission tantamount to acknowledging the effect of the tides on seafront real estate, that recalcitrance is given no more or less weight than John Roberts's opinion or the administration's compromises.

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The administration hasn't handled the sales job as well as it could have. (Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick, one of the president's earliest supporters and the man to whom fell the job of selling Willard Romney's health-care reform in Massachusetts, told me as much last year.) But I think we can all agree that, for example, if you're trying to sell ice cream, and the people across the street start screaming that you're selling the kids frozen chocolate botulism, the sales job gets a bit harder. The motives of the political opposition to health-care have been allowed deliberately to remain murky. The fact is that the opposition is funded by people who do not believe that the benefits of the country's wealth should be shared by all of its people. The fact is that the politicians funded by those people believe, implicitly and explicitly, that there are people in this country who deserve good health, and people who don't, and that they can be distinguished by what they can afford. To leave these motives shadowy and implied his is a choice that the courtier press has made. This is why the woman in Kentucky is so confused.

Bartender, a double Prestone, and see what the pundits in the back room will have.

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